Chapter 8
*I jinxed it. I absolutely jinxed it.*
That thought kept cycling through my head like a mantra as I paced laps around the eighth floor of the Astronomy Tower. *Where can I find a training space for combat magic practice? Where can I find a training space for combat magic practice?*
Honestly, I was starting to doubt the reliability of what I knew.
Three days I'd been wandering the three tallest towers in Hogwarts, calling it mental magic training — because I didn't know what else to call the attempt to hold a single thought in mind for hours at a stretch — and my progress in finding the room I was looking for remained stubbornly close to zero.
I'd even given up part of my morning training routine to free up more time for the search. The last thing I wanted was to disappoint the others by failing to find a suitable place.
Though occupying some abandoned classroom would have been worse. Primarily because there were no truly abandoned classrooms in the castle — not really. They were all in use by someone. Unofficial clubs needed somewhere to meet, and the castle's more remote corners had long since been claimed by couples looking for privacy.
"Damn it, where am I supposed to find a place to practice combat magic?" The thought I'd been carefully containing in my head broke loose and came out of my mouth on a wave of genuine frustration.
And then, strangely enough, it worked.
Something rustled behind me. The air currents shifted. I nearly hit the ceiling — I hadn't expected any sound at my back — and turned to find a solid oak door that had not been there a moment ago. I ran to it immediately and shouldered my way inside.
"Thank Merlin. I found you," I said, laughing with genuine relief, taking in the training arena laid out before me. Raised platforms and dueling floors occupied most of the space in the broad room, which looked as though it had been reconstructed from ancient paintings and chronicles — atmospheric and old in a way that felt striking even by Hogwarts's standards.
Beyond the platforms, the room also contained ordinary practice dummies for spell-drilling, and some peculiar half-golems that looked like knights from the early Middle Ages, complete with spears, shields, and axes clutched in stone hands.
"Combat magic training apparently used to include facing armed opponents," I muttered, studying them with interest. "Or maybe these are for close-quarters practice."
I had no idea how to use them, and decided that was a problem for later.
*I'll sort that out this evening with the others. For now — I need to confirm I can call the room again.*
I left the training hall, stepped back into the corridor, and tried three more times to summon the same room. All three worked without issue. I didn't even need to speak aloud — the room responded to directed thought, not words.
Which was probably exactly why I'd been failing to find it for three days. I'd paced this tower before without success. The difference was that in an ordinary state of mind, even with the right thoughts cycling through my head, I wasn't always able to truly *project* them outward. That required either concentrated focus or a strong emotional charge behind the desire — and after too many repetitions of the same thought, both had been draining away.
The moment I'd snapped and started shouting from sheer frustration, my thoughts had been vivid and sharp and entirely directed at what I wanted. The Room of Requirement had chosen that moment to appear. And by pure good fortune, I'd been making my third circuit of the correct spot when it happened.
*Well. Lucky or not, I got there,* I thought, already heading back toward the common room. A full day of classes still waited — skipping without Madam Pomfrey's written note was not something even the Marauders dared risk. The worst punishments in the school were reserved for unexcused absences, and the only valid excuse was official medical documentation. Without it, showing your face to the teaching staff after a missed class was roughly equivalent to walking in already having broken both your legs. There had been candidates for that approach, admittedly.
"Hey — don't scatter after Potions today," I announced, arriving back in the dormitory to find the others just beginning to stir. "I found us somewhere brilliant to train."
"Mm, Moony, keep it down." Sirius waved me off without opening his eyes, his hair forming a spectacular bird's nest. "We're not rushing anywhere after Potions." He paused, then cracked one eye open. "You're actually good timing though. Andromeda wrote back last night — she's sending a few combat magic references by the weekend. And something about concentrating force in spells."
"Good news. What about you, James?" I looked at the slightly more alert Potter, who'd already sent his own letter.
"Nothing yet." He shrugged. "Father has some business with the family affairs, so my problem will wait until he has time."
"Fair enough. We'll drill what we already know and work through Sirius's references when they arrive." I accepted the situation easily enough, still in good spirits from finding the room. Even the most grueling day of the school week couldn't dent my mood — a mood I shared freely with the others, stoking their curiosity about the place I'd found.
The Marauders were explorers at heart. We'd already mapped most of Hogwarts's secret passages and hidden alcoves onto a shared parchment — not the enchanted Marauder's Map I knew from the films, just a regular sketch, but it was ours. So when I finally brought them to the Room of Requirement that evening, their reaction was difficult to overstate.
"Remus, what in the name of werewolves is this?!" Sirius practically shouted, running a full circuit of one of the training platforms. "This thing just leapt straight to the top of every find we've ever made in this castle! Can it make other rooms?"
"Let's find out," I said, smiling.
"Weren't we supposed to be training?" Peter asked cautiously, though he was clearly just as excited by the prospect.
"We've got all the way until curfew!" James said, already sharing Sirius's energy. "Plenty of time to wave our wands later."
"Let's not get too ambitious — we still need to make dinner," I added, following them out of the dueling hall as we began our experiments.
The Room of Requirement had real capability and real limits, as it turned out. Libraries, living quarters, open halls, and training rooms — these it produced without apparent difficulty. But more complex or expansive requests were another matter. A Quidditch pitch was beyond it. The swimming pool I requested appeared with neither water nor drainage. The shower cubicles had the same problem. When we tried to reproduce the Gryffindor common room, the room instead produced a hidden alcove with a direct passage opening into the real common room, directly across from its largest fireplace. The same happened with the Potions classroom — another secret passage, this one leading somewhere into the castle's depths.
"What an extraordinary bloody thing," Sirius concluded, at the end of all our experiments. "We even managed a proper Potions laboratory!"
"True — though we should probably confirm that the laboratory is actually part of this room and not someone else's private lab that happens to have a hidden door," I noted, aware we'd moved too quickly to check every detail.
"Remus." Sirius narrowed his eyes. "Don't tell me you're planning to take up extra Potions work."
"Not now," I said. "I don't have the ingredients for serious brewing. But I'll work that out eventually."
"Just don't turn into a second Niunius, or I'm having you checked for curses at St. Mungo's," Sirius said, poking me in the shoulder with theatrical seriousness.
"So they can immediately use a Hogwarts student as ingredients the moment they identify a genuine werewolf?" I said, entirely unbothered. "Right. Jokes aside — let's actually start training. Dinner's in two hours and we haven't tested each other yet."
"Fully agreed." James was already stepping onto the nearest platform. "And we can finally find out which of us Marauders is the best duelist."
He promptly caught a curse from Sirius — not lethal, but not pleasant either.
After which Sirius's own bag of tricks was tested on me, and I found some of them distinctly unpleasant. He still lost. Tying his shoelaces together stopped him from dodging my Banishing Charm, and he sailed cleanly off the platform.
Potter then climbed onto that same platform with the stubborn determination of a stag who'd spotted something worth charging, managed to catch me mid-attack, and nearly scratched my eyes out with transfigured glass shards. The final accounting had Sirius losing to me, Potter losing to Sirius, and me losing to Potter. Peter lost to all of us, though he came away with the least damage by far.
Our group of brave duelists then made the trip to the hospital wing to have their "combat injuries" seen to, followed by an extended lecture from Madam Pomfrey on what could result from unsupervised training sessions without an experienced instructor present.
An instructor we had no realistic way of finding. And stopping after only one session wasn't something any of us was prepared to consider. Hitting each other with magic in something approaching a real fight had been genuinely excellent, the competitive charge of it pulling equally at all four of us, and watching the others go at it from the sidelines was every bit as entertaining as being in the fight yourself.
"We should put together a supply of first aid potions," James said afterward, his enthusiasm entirely undiminished. "Going to the hospital wing after every session is a below-average plan."
"I'd also learn a few basic healing spells," I added. "Just for genuinely unforeseen situations."
"We can handle the potions, Sirius and I," James said, then trailed off at the mention of healing spells, visibly unenthused by the prospect of tackling something that demanding.
"Yes, I suggested it, so I'll handle it," I sighed, adding inwardly that healing charms would certainly not be wasted in my arsenal.
*No way to know what life is going to throw at me next. Relying entirely on werewolf regeneration isn't a strategy. And St. Mungo's isn't an option — they won't use me for ingredients, but they won't treat me either.*
"Are you sure you can manage spells like that?" James was watching me with genuine attention.
"Worth trying," I said, and gave a nod that was more confident than I felt.
The schedule I'd been running already didn't have much room, and it had just gotten tighter. Free time waved goodbye to me again, promising ever-increasing demands on my unfortunately singular head.
Fortunately, mental magic included disciplines and specific spells for handling larger volumes of information more efficiently. Sirius had brought back several books on the subject from the holidays, and they'd remained essentially in my personal use — the other Marauders had little enthusiasm for that particular branch of magic.
*Their loss.* I shook my head inwardly, though the thought was accompanied by genuine satisfaction at my own progress. *I'm already starting to manage mid-level mental shields with some consistency.* It might have sounded arrogant, but there genuinely did seem to be some talent there — most likely the accumulated experience of a previous life making itself useful at last.